Were the Fires Last Summer Deliberately Set?

Answer: in many cases yes. And it will happen again soon.

This week and next I am running 3-5 minute reads that pick apart the reason for the failing economy for the bottom 70%. As Dr. Peter St. Onge  says, the bottom 9 rungs on the ladder have been knocked out. These essays describe why, and how, if fixed, the economy will soar. I am taking ten days off the cortisol carousel, because the next six months are going to be busy. And awesome. And pivotal in world history. Back on Saturday, the 14th.

Also this is a farewell to the environmental file. I have written about this in depth for the past 20 years, one book, four in depth policy papers and hundreds upon hundreds of essays. I have been writing for Michael Walsh’s the-pipeline.org, which attempts to take down the environmental junta, and I found I don’t have much more to say. Will keep up with any more developments. In any case you will be receiving five minute reads on this heart-breaking mistake over the next ten days. Read them, file them, ignore them. They will be here to read whenever you want. Or to send to your family and friends who don’t understand the threat.

A Google Earth satellite video is making the rounds on twitter. it shows the moment an arc of fires began in northern Quebec, the smoke rising. It looks like people calculated the prevailing winds so that the smoke would blow south. Then connected via sat phone, they lit them. It’s another psy-op from our gracious overlords. We aren’t afraid enough, despite every nasty limiting idiotic play they have visited upon us in the last four years. Monkey Pox failed, more plague warnings were greeted by a shrug. But this one, the world bursting into flame? Be very very afraid.

Justin Trudeau lost no time in announcing that the fires were from “climate change” and the carbon tax, which is impoverishing everyone not in government or on lush pensions, is just the beginning of the restrictions he must institute or we are all gonna die. 

The stupidity and cruelty of this is almost unimaginable. But fires have worked over and over again to terrify people into quiescence. The rumours that they were deliberate were the stuff of fantasy until people started getting arrested. Alberta shows that almost 60 percent of fires in that province are human caused. And in Canada, as of today, we have arrested dozens. They will be released, their bails paid by a high-priced lawyer because most of them act as agents of the hyper-rich, paid through a cascade of environmental NGOs.  The richest people among us are burning the forests in order to force compliance.

When I moved back to the country 20 years ago, the movement adopted me because I was writing for the Globe and Mail and Harper’s Magazine. I interviewed hundreds of local activists, the ones who, with the inspiration of RFK, Jr. had shut down the biggest industrial forest in the world in an action called “The War of the Woods.” They were mostly ordinary people, socialists and scientists of one stripe or another and deeply profoundly committed to saving the earth. The fact that they had eliminated the principal source of funding for health care and education -- forestry --  their own in fact, went right over their heads. It didn’t matter. "Climate Change" was an existential threat and those trees must stand to suck up “carbon,” or CO2, as it used to be known.

I met Denis Hayes too, the founder of Earth Day, head of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, founded by the heiresses to Weyerhaeuser. He excitedly told me how he created the storm of protest that led to Bill Clinton shutting down the western forests of the U.S., during the same period that Clinton was giving away American manufacturing to China. The result was devastation in forested communities from northern California to the Canadian border. Hayes, a tall, attractive Ivy Leaguer married to a woman whose father won a Nobel in chemistry, slithers through every institution. When I hung out with him, his target was Bill Gates' climate initiatives and clearly, he has succeeded.

Forestry management: even a child can do it!

His "work" turned the forests into a tinderbox. Today, the 9th of June, 2023, a full thirty years too late, the Wall Street Journal editorial board finally acknowledges that sustainable forestry management may be the principal cause of the forests burning down. Holly Fretwell, a fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center, and professor at Montana State, gives, in this book, a thoroughgoing analysis of how wrong-headed and destructive "green" has been in the forests. Also this book by me, and a follow-up policy paper, also by me. These were not popular opinions, but they were, in fact, right. It is not "climate change" burning down the forests, it is government in the hands of brutal greens, in pursuit of an impossible goal.

Fires have been used in my region to dissuade development. If you are, for instance, trying to open a resort for the middle class, expect fires. If you are a forester with a section of land, and you are mouthy, expect a fire. Fire serves to shut people up. I am sporadically loud-mouthed in my town, because I know my dog, my house, my trees and my well make me vulnerable if I make too many enviros angry.

Five years ago, Fort McMurray, the home of the oil sands, a titanic achievement, the cleanest oil extraction infrastructure on the planet, burned to the ground in a fire called The Beast. There were reports of fires being set in an arc around the town. Investigations are on-going. During the last election in Alberta, fire patterns were shown to peak at election time, in order to scare people into believing that oil extraction, the engine of their economy, must be shut down.

Further south, the chronicle of eco-terrorism is thick with crime but few suffer prison. Usually it’s  slap on the wrist, a "Go with God, noble soul" kind of thing. So, if you’re not caught, why not go big?

Please consider a very cheap annual subscription. I am so so grateful for the paid (and other subscriptions) over the past month. And messages from subscribers who pay are so encouraging, so uplifting, I find myself too abashed to reply my thanks, so herewith, you are the wind beneath my wings, and sometime cliches say the necessary better than anything.

Elizabeth Nickson was trained as a reporter at the London bureau of Time Magazine. She became European Bureau Chief of LIFE magazine in its last years of monthly publication, and during that time, acquired the rights to Nelson Mandela’s memoir before he was released from Robben Island. She went on to write for Harper’s Magazine, the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent, the Sunday Telegraph, the Sunday Times Magazine, the Telegraph, the Globe and Mail and the National Post. Her first book The Monkey Puzzle Tree was an investigation of the CIA MKULTRA mind control program and was published by Bloomsbury and Knopf Canada. Her next book, Eco-Fascists, How Radical Environmentalists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage, was a look at how environmentalism, badly practiced, is destroying the rural economy and rural culture in the U.S. and all over the world. It was published by Adam Bellow at Harper Collins US. You can subscribe to her Substack at elizabethnickson.substack.com/